Comics UK

According to today's Weekly News an old friend returns next week. Don't miss the story of Black Bob the wonder dog.

Wow!

stevezodiac wrote:According to today's Weekly News an old friend returns next week. Don't miss the story of Black Bob the wonder dog.

Is that reprints or new adventures?

I'm afraid that's all it says as above. (with a picture of Bob) It doesn't even make it clear if its text or a strip.

Weekly News website is no help either, it's just some corporate page with barely any mention of what the publication actually contains.

I thought you would all like to see this. It looks like the originals have been cleaned up and are being given yet another airing.

colcool007 wrote:It looks like the originals have been cleaned up

How can you tell, Col, and in any case why would they need to be cleaned up? After all, it's not going to be newsprint to newsprint. The original source material will surely have to be used, so long as it has been carefully filed away since its last outing.

Phoenix wrote:

colcool007 wrote:It looks like the originals have been cleaned up

How can you tell, Col, and in any case why would they need to be cleaned up? After all, it's not going to be newsprint to newsprint. The original source material will surely have to be used, so long as it has been carefully filed away since its last outing.

Well, the last original art I saw that was at least 40 years old showed signs of browning and fading, so it would make sense that if they are going to be reprinted that a little cleaning is applied before they are printed. And when you consider that Black Bob was first printed as a picture story back in 1946, which is 70 years ago, I would be surprised that no matter how carefully the originals had been stored if the original artwork did not warrant some amount of cleaning up before they were re-used.

Not a return of the strip but a full two page history of Black Bob. I hadn't realised the Weekly News strips were exclusive to the paper and predated the strips in the Dandy. They reprint the first ever strip from the Weekly News.

When Bob started in the Dandy in 1944, it was a prose story, not a strip. This was two years before the Weekly News strip started in 1946. Bob ran in the Dandy for a long time, so I wouldn't be surprised if material appeared in Weekly News first and Dandy later (especially since all Black Bob strips in the Dandy from 1968 until the story's end in 1982 were reprint).

Dennis the Menace also appeared..

there are stories of Black Bob and Dennis the Menace which have not been in the comic and would be great reprinted..

Wouldn't the 1956 and 1958 Dennis annuals have used some of the WN strips?

They did But not all of them...
They are the ones that cover two pages..

Hi Peter/Digi

Re Dennis and Black Bob in 'The Weekly News' -

Dennis appeared in the Weekly News from issue No 5134(7/11/53) to issue No 5331(17/8/57), a total of 198 appearances. Of these almost half, 98, were later reprinted in the bi-annual Dennis books. Eight appeared in the 1962 edition, 32 in the 1964 edition, 33 in the 1966 edition, (in both the 1964 and 1966 editions this amounted to all of the reprinted strip content with no reprints coming from the Beano comic at all) and finally 25 in the 1970 edition.
As to Black Bob all of the strips that appeared in the Dandy comic from 1956 had first been published in the Weekly News. The only difference being that for their appearance in the weekly comic the usually nine panel per week Weekly News strips were edited down to eight panels per week to fit the confines of the comic page.

In fifty years of collecting I have never come across a copy of the Weekly News with Dennis or Bob in it. Very hard to find.